Stephen Mangan plays the mother and father-to-be in this gruesomely
entertaining new comedy Birthday by Joe Penhall at the Royal Court.

“How could you forget my f---ing raspberry leaf tea?” Stephen Mangan’s dishevelled Ed, both the father and mother-to-be of his second child, snaps near the start of Joe Penhall’s gruesomely entertaining new comedy which fruitfully wonders what would happen if men could take a starring role in the messy, fraught end-game of human reproduction.

It’s not a pretty sight. Holed up in a barren NHS room and with no sign of the anaesthetist, Ed – rubbing his huge tummy and shifting in discomfort – is taking the strain out on his nearest but not particularly dearest, Lisa. Played with a wonderful air of brittle composure by Lisa Dillon, the latter is doing her best to indulge her husband’s prima donna-ish outbursts. But having been there herself, and now wearing the trousers as the family’s breadwinner, her tolerance levels aren’t much higher than his pain threshold.

Penhall is onto an absolute winner here, taking an inspired idea and using its inversion of normal biological procedure to breed a fertile mix of existential questions and corporeal, sometimes gross-out humour. For all the hospital soaps on TV, there’s nothing out there that cuts with anything like this double-edged finesse to the heart of how we manage the whole birth business in this country and to the core of vexed issues about who does what in modern relationships.

A father himself, Penhall makes you think about the agonies a bloke might have to endure in going beyond the usual call of hormonal duty – sacrificing booze, curry and sex in the run-up while suffering all manner of humiliations come the big day. But the feminist flip side is to make you see what’s taken for granted. Lisa and the two female nursing staff (a hilariously blasé African midwife, played by Llewella Gideon, and Louise Brealey’s well-meaning young registrar) may patronise Ed. But they’re only giving him a taste of the standard sexist medicine.

It’s undoubtedly Mangan’s night in Roger Michell’s stark, stylish and briskly efficient production. A blissful comic actor, he hits every note of petulance, panic and self-pity dead on, sucking on the gas-and-air like a helpless child needing its dummy, but he also nurtures a body of deep emotion that swells to a pregnant pitch of anguish and recrimination as the evening rises to an exhausted peak. If you’ve been there, you’ll love this. If you’re pondering parenthood, my god will it give you pause.